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Philosophy Newsletter - Fall 2015

In this issue...

 

Department Updates

Cross presents in Ontario

Professor Chuck Cross presented a version of "Every proposition is a counterfactual" (accepted for publication in Acta Analytica) at the May 2015 meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. In March 2015, Cross was appointed an associate editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

 

Fahmy presents in Vienna, hosts Kant conference at UGA

Associate Professor Melissa Seymour Fahmy presented her paper, “The Kantian Innate to Freedom: Independence from What?” at the 12th International Kant Congress held in Vienna, Austria this past September. She also presented a paper entitled “Love’s Reasons” as part of the Institute for Women’s Studies Friday Speaker Series.  A long version of this paper is forthcoming in the Journal of Value Inquiry.  Fahmy will be hosting the Southern Study Group Meeting of the North American Kant Society at the University of Georgia in February of 2016.  Associate Professor Oliver Sensen of Tulane University will be presenting the keynote address.  A full program will be available in January.

 

Halper organizes Plato Soceity meeting, presents papers

Distinguished Research Professor and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor Edward Halper was a co-organizer of the interim meeting of the International Plato Society held at Emory University in March 2015 where he commented on John Rist's, “How Plato Learned to Think Meta-Ethically.” Following this meeting, three of the plenary speakers, Luc Brisson, John Rist, and Sarah Boradie presented different papers at UGA. Other papers given by Edward Halper in recent months include: “Self-Determination as First Principle” (at the annual meeting of the Metaphysical Society of America, held at UGA in April), “The Value of Soul's Descent” (at the annual meeting of the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies in Buenos Aires, Argentina in June), and “Aristotle’s Moral Realism” (at the 10th Annual Marquette Summer Seminar on Aristotle and the Aristotelian Tradition, held at Marquette University in June). In December, Halper will be presenting papers at the Association for Jewish Studies in Boston and at a conference at the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem.

 

Jagnow presents in Estonia, Savannah, New Orleans, awarded Willson Fellowship

Associate Professor René Jagnow presented the paper “The Cognitive Phenomenonology Debate and the Distinction between Sensory and Cognitive Phenomenology” at the 23rd annual meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology in June in Tartu, Estonia. In November he presented the paper “Pictorial Experience and Inflection” at the 73rd annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics in Savannah. Dr. Jagnow also presented two commentaries: in April, he commented on John Spackman’s paper “Conceptualism and the Richness of Perceptual Content” at the 107th annual meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology in New Orleans; and in September he commented on Assaf Weksler’s paper “Retinal Images and Object Files” for the 2015 Minds Online Conference. Dr. Jagnow was also rewarded a Willson Center Research Fellowship that allowed him to continue his research on a project on pictorial representation during the spring term 2015.

 

Stephens presents multiple papers, awarded Willson Fellowship

Associate Professor Piers Stephens was an invited commentator on the annual Coss Lecture of the Society for Advancement of American Philosophy at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, responding to Brook Muller’s guest lecture “The Machine is a Watershed for Living In (Reconstituting Architectural Horizons)” in March 2015. Later the same month, Stephens was also an invited speaker at Emory University’s Philosophy Department, presenting his paper “Transatlantic Tributaries: Tracking the Streams of Influence Upon William James’s Pragmatism.” In addition, Dr. Stephens presented two conference papers this year: “Nature as Liberty’s Touchstone: A Historical and Conceptual Sketch,” presented to the Environmental Politics group session of the Western Political Science Association conference in Las Vegas in April, and “Norton vs Callicott on Interpreting Aldo Leopold: A Jamesian View,” was presented to the 19th International Association for Environmental Philosophy conference in Atlanta in October. Dr. Stephens was also awarded a Willson Center Research Fellowship that allowed him to concentrate on his research activities in during the fall 2015 semester and resulted in multiple publications (see below).

 

Winfield delivers keynote, hosts Metaphysical Society

Distinguished Research Professor Richard Dien Winfield delivered the keynote address, “Reason and Time”, at the banquet of the Collaborations Conference at Southern Illinois University*** in March  2015. Ph.D. candidate Graham Schuster, Winfield’s invited collaborator, delivered his own keynote address at the same banquet immediately before the presentation. In April, Winfield hosted the 66th Annual Meeting of the Metaphysical Society of America at UGA and delivered the presidential address, “Self-Determination in Logic and Reality.” In July, Winfield delivered the talk, “Aesthetics, Literary Form, and Civilization” at Christ Church College in Kanpur, India.

 

Sarah Wright presents in Slovenia and Thailand

Associate Professor Sarah Wright presented the paper “Epistemic Authority, Intellectual Humility, and Eudaimonia” at both the Intersection of Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind Conference in Slovenia and at the Episteme 11th Anniversary Conference in Thailand.  

 

Ahumada, Scott, Shiver awarded Ph.D.s

Peter Michael Ahumada successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, "Language: An Overhaul of Linguistic Philosophy" in April under the direction of Richard Dien Winfield. He graduated in May and is now teaching mathematics full time at Cedar Shoals High School in Athens.

Robert Scott received his Ph.D. in May under the direction of Dr. Piers Stephens. Robert's dissertation, entitled "Ecological Responsibility as an Imperative and a Virtue: A Transcendental Phenomenological Approach" has been nominated by the Graduate School to represent UGA for a national award, the CGS/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award. Scott also recently presented a paper drawn from his dissertation at the International Association of Environmental Philosophy. He was hired in July as a lecturer in philosophy at the University of North Georgia, Gainesville.

Anthony Shiver defended his dissertation "Parts and Plurals: Essays on the Logic and Metaphysics of Plurality" in April 2015 under Professor Chuck Cross's supervision. Shiver received his Ph.D. in May 2015, and he accepted a position in the LSAT test development group of the Law School Admission Council.

 

Pugliese receives teaching and research awards, travels to Brazil

Ph. D. candidate Nastassja Pugliese received the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award in spring 2015 and was selected by CTL as a 2015–16 Future Faculty Program participant. As a FFP TA, she participated this fall in the university wide Annual T.A. Orientation where she gave two talks. The first was on the role and responsibilities of an instructor of record and the second was on the challenges of being an international T.A. at UGA. In the summer of 2015, Pugliese was awarded the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute (LACSI)-Tinker Foundation Graduate Field Research Award to conduct research and present the second chapter of her dissertation at the Spinoza Studies research group at the University of São Paulo. She also received an invitation to give a workshop and a talk on methods for teaching logic at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil. The travel for the II Workshop on Philosophy and Teaching at UFRGS was supported by the Office of the Vice-President for Research Foreign Travel Award and the CNPQ (Brazilian National Center for Research). The material she produced for the workshop is now available for the Portuguese speaking community at the online database CLEF (Luso-Brazilian Center for Teaching Practices in Philosophy). In the fall of 2015, Pugliese received the 2015–16 Scholarship for Teaching and Learning Mini-Grant Program to continue her teaching-as-research project “Strategies for Teaching Formal and Informal Logic.” This SoTL program is funded by UGA Graduate School in partnership with CIRTL, a national consortium of 22 research universities funded by the National Science Foundation and the Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation.

 

Schuster delivers keynote at Collaborations conference

Ph.D. candidate Graham Schuster delivered a keynote address, "Reason and Time: The Problem with Past, Present, and Future” at the banquet of the Collaborations Conference*** at Southern Illinois University in March 2015 as the invited collaborator of Dr. Richard Dien Winfield.

 

Wright presents in Austria

Ava Thomas Wright (Ph.D. candidate) presented her paper “Two Failures of Arthur Ripstein's Conception of Kantian Freedom as Purposiveness” at the 12th International Kant Congress held in Vienna, Austria in September. Her colloquium paper, "Business Corporations Should Not Have Moral Rights of Free Expression," has been accepted for presentation at the APA Central meeting in Chicago in spring 2016.  

 


Publications

O. Bradley Bassler (Associate Professor)Bassler_book cover.jpg

The Long Shadow of the Parafinite: Three Scenes from the Prehistory of a Concept (2015, Docent Press) (cover at right)

 

Chuck Cross (Professor)

"A logical transmission principle for conclusive reasons" in Australasian Journal of Philosophy (June 2015)

"Embedded counterfactuals and possible worlds semantics," accepted for publication in Philosophical Studies.

"Every proposition is a counterfactual," accepted for publication in Acta Analytica.

 

Edward Halper (Distinguished Research Professor, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor)

“The Rationality of Being” in The Review of Metaphysics (volume 68, 2015)

“Klein and Cassirer: Symbol and Symbolic Form,” in Journal of Speculative Philosophy (spring 2015)

 

René Jagnow (Associate Professor)

 “Can We See Natural Kind Properties?” in a special issue on the Philosophy of Mind in Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (volume 44, 2015)

 

samaris book cover.jpgThanassis Samaras (Lecturer)

Plato's Politics: A Critical Guide, edited by Thornton Lockwood and Thanassis Samaras (2015, Cambridge University Press). Samaras’ essay, “Aristotle and the Question of Citizenship” appears in this edition. (cover at right)

“Metaphysics, Politics and Poetic Laguage in Anaximander” in Literature, Scholarship, Philosophy and History: Classical Studies in Memory of Ioannis Taifacos, edited by Georgios Xenis. (2015, Franz Steiner Verlag) 

 

Piers Stephens (Associate Professor)

“John Stuart Mill: The Greening of the Liberal Heritage,” in Engaging Nature: Environmentalism, Concepts of Nature, and the Study of the Canon, edited by Peter Cannavo and Joseph Lane (2014, MIT Press)

“Environmental Political Theory and the Liberal Tradition” in the Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory (2015, Oxford University Press)

“On the Nature of ‘Nature’: The Real Meanings and Significance of John Stuart Mill’s Misunderstood Essay,” in Environmental Ethics (fall 2015, forthcoming)

Stephens has also published three book reviews this year, appearing in the journals Environmental Values and Ethics and the Environment.

 

winfield book cover_0.jpgRichard Dien Winfield (Distinguished Research Professor)

The Intelligent Mind: On the Genesis and Constitution of Discursive Intelligence (2015, Palgrave Macmillan). This is Dr. Winfield’s 18th book (cover at right).

 

Sarah Wright (Associate Professor)

“Epistemic Authority, Epistemic Preemption, and the Intellectual Virtues,” with comment from Jennifer Lackey, in Episteme (forthcoming)

 

Christopher Byron (Ph. D. candidate)

“A Critique of Axel Honneth’s Concept of Reification” in Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture (volume 14, 2015)

“Marx’s Theory of Human Nature and its Relation to Essence and Alienation” in Science and Society (forthcoming 2016)

“Physicalism and the Exploitation Theory of Profit are Incompatible: A Response to Robert Paul Wolff” in Is Marx’s Theory of Profit Right? co-authored by Chris Byron, Alan Freeman, and Andrew Kliman, in The Simultaneist-Temporalist Debate (forthcoming, Lexington Books)

 

Tony Chackal (Ph.D. candidate)

“Autonomy and the Politics of Food Choice: From Individuals to Communities” in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics (December 2015)

 

Isadora Mosch (Ph. D. candidate)

“The Philosophy of a Controversial Joke,” Philosophy Now, in press (volume 111, December 2015/January 2016)

 

Nastassja Pugliese (Ph. D. candidate)

“Relationships between the kinds of knowledge in Spinoza” and a translation of Wim Klever’s “Van den Enden’s Radical Political Philosophy behind Spinoza’s” to be published in the XI Colóquio Internacional Spinoza compendium

 

Anthony Shiver (recent Ph. D. graduate)

"How do you say ‘everything is ultimately composed of atoms’?" in Philosophical Studies (March 2015)

 

wood byron book cover_0.jpgNathan Michael Wood & Chris Byron (Ph. D. candidates)

"'Money gives power... well, a run for its money'—Marx's Observations on why Capital and not Frank, is really in charge of the White House” in “House of Cards” and Philosophy, edited  by J. Edward Hackett and William Irwin (2015, Wiley-Blackwell) (cover at right)

 

Michael Yudanin (Ph. D. candidate)

“Can Positive Duties be Derived from Kant’s Categorical Imperative?” in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (volume 18, June 2015)

 

 


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